Or how to publish another book in no time at all!

Was the Night Before Christmas…. well, maybe the month before.

The LSF team had just finished work on Santa’s Bedtime Book of Adventure Stories and Santa was busy reading them nightly for all the little girls and boys.

All was right with the world and all we had to do now was to relax and wait for Christmas Day.

‘Screw that,’ screamed Chris Jones from stage left…

Judging by the title of this piece, you would be forgiven if you thought I was referring to this Judge Dredd.

Anyone who has seen the movies (2012 being my preference because I love the concept of a contained dystopian story inside a tower block, and a psycho female drug baron as the antagonist) will know that Dredd is the law, and it’s his way or… die.

How does this relate to judging stories for the Twisted Ghosts of Christmas and Santa’s Bedtime Book of Adventure Stories anthologies? Were the team dreadful to work with because they were all using Slo-Mo in order to cope with reading hundreds of submissions super fast? Were the editor and producer laying down the law like Dredd would?

I have written literally hundreds of short pieces, to a one-day deadline, to a prompt. The prospect of getting a story done in ten days held no horrors for me.  At the beginning of lock down I joined a group of writers who did the daily tasks for 70 days in a row, completing over 13,300 words in the process, each! I didn’t stop there and have continued this every day since 24th March 2020.

What’s another short story in the mix? Easy, right?

However, writing horror is not something I’ve tried very often, and the main concern I had was whether I could write something horrific enough to be considered for inclusion in the Twisted anthology. My entry for Twisted 50 Vol 1 was rejected. Could I up my game and make it this time?

Time was never my friend.

Any kind of deadline... it usually didn't end well.

Four, five month deadlines for anthologies and I crashed and burned.

But there would be no dishonour in failing to meet a 10 day deadline. Because that's obviously impossible, anyhow, right? So I opened up TextEdit—because unlike Word that meant I wasn't really serious, clearly, was just jotting down random thoughts—and before I knew it had close on 800 words.

Pasted it into Word and thought: this looks like a story... what did I just do???

Classic Horror fans may recall a moment in Bram Stoker's DRACULA, when Van Helsing lops off vampire Lucy's head, CUTS TO him slicing a bloody joint of roast beef on a tavern table. Directed by Francis Ford Coppola, starring Gary Oldman and Winona Ryder, it's one of the best ever moments in movie horror that explores aspects of flesh – raw or cooked, ripped or shredded, bloody or drained.  As sentient flesh ourselves, naturally we're sensitive to these kinds of connections.

Don't Look Now

You'll have your own motives for reading or writing Horror. Universally shared reasons include awareness of our own fragile mortality, and ultimately, fear that we might have to confront the predator. We are hard-wired to weigh the odds of our survival. Also, we're fascinated. We don't want to look, but we can't resist.  This is how Stephen King draws us in. Often, he shows us what a character sees before we (through the character's eyes) understand it.

The submissions for the Twisted: Ghosts of Christmas initiative were sooooo good, we decided to include even more authors work!

So drum roll please for the authors we just added to the book…

• Steven Butler
• Simon Cluett
• Evie James
• Al Campbell
• Michael van Koetsveld
• Lee Burgess
• Kendall Castor-Perry
• Nick Yates
• Harriet Barbir
• Rebecca Handley

As ever, debate among the judges was heated, but we finally arrived at a list!

Please do leave a comment on this post, and if you are not on the list, keep going, it’s an insane job to judge art. We may also sneak some bonus stories into the eBook too!

I will be in touch soon about when to buy copies of the book so that we can co-ordinate getting on the Amazon Best Seller list.

OK.. the tension mounts… So drum roll please… The successful writers and stories are…

Last night at midnight, we closed submissions with just shy of 100 short stories being submitted to Twisted: Ghosts of Christmas.

We have a deadline of the 12th December to have the final draft up and online, so things are 24/7 here!

Our team of experienced readers and writers have been reading everything as it comes in so as to get the jump on the deadline, so we hit our publishing date of December 16th.

Every story will be read by four people before the team choose the stories for the book. Elinor Perry-Smith is heading this up, as she also did Twisted 2 and had decades of experience helping writers.